Projects
Development decisions, tests, and lessons from the Beer Game Cabinet project.
8posts
ProjectsBeer Game CabinetRoot Bear is a Playdate game about turning a crank to pour the perfect root beer. We moved it onto a physical potentiometer lever and a touch panel, and by the end of one day the inside of the cabinet was genuine plant equipment.
ProjectsBeer Game CabinetPart 2 of the arcade cabinet. A ball lever modeled parametrically in Blender and printed on a 3D printer, and a Pro Controller haptics transplant that failed - one photo of the real part overturned the whole design.
ProjectsBeer Game CabinetThe title screen became a game select menu and blackjack became game two. A house rule deals the dealer a card every time you take one, and inheriting the first game's leaderboard and comms layer cut the build time in half.
ProjectsBeer Game CabinetA full day spent making the HMI screen feel alive: five animations, a pub background drawn in code, and a bartender that took four failed shape-built bears before one AI handed the drawing to another.
ProjectsBeer Game CabinetThe ERM vibration motor promised in Part 2 is installed and buzzing, but pulling the lever further changed nothing. After two wrong theories we stopped guessing, logged the actual values, and found the output window was the problem.
ProjectsBeer Game CabinetThe input device picked the game again: an analog joystick meant a vertical scrolling shooter. Climbing a night sky, shooting enemies, and getting stronger on pickups - plus a memory remap, a broken cause and effect, and an interpolation fix.
ProjectsBeer Game CabinetNo new parts, just the beer lever again. The design looked elegant on paper and played badly, and the work was translating four vague impressions into four exact numbers - tension, fish stamina, hooking, and haptics.
ProjectsBeer Game CabinetFrom one lever to a cabinet holding four games, seven posts collected on one page - in the order the parts arrived and the games followed them.
